Sometimes a tiny, coincidental discovery can open completely new horizons. Like when you're on a crowded party and that one person you decide to talk to turns out to be the love of your life. Or when you're in a room full of instruments and for once you decide to not to pick the lute, not the weird, fascinating cello-like instrument on the wall... but the banjo.

The Roadkill EP was born from one of these discoveries. There are lots of instruments that I'd always really wished to own or be able to play, a piano, a cello, a harp, a clarinette... but I would never had expected that one day I could fall in love with a banjo.

Yet since this is exactly what happened, I decided to start exploring this instrument's versatility by recording a couple of songs equipped with nothing else but a banjo. (Well... I admit, there's a tambourine in one song..)

Over the last four months I collected those songs. They occasionally sprouted, sometimes several a day, sometimes none for weeks, and then grew and ripened. I harvested them at home, though a bit more carefully than usual. They tell little tales of friendship and failure, of discovering the world and of hiding at home, and the banjo helped tracing their contours and gave them a shape.

It brought me through a very cold winter. Now maybe it can brighten yours a bit, too?

Everything by Julia Kotowski